Vision Refresh

This is just an update for the sake of accountability.

Would you believe the spam I get on this blog? Every day I see at least a half-dozen spam comments on various posts, and easily a dozen spammy messages on the “Private Contact” form. Right now, the latter is mostly a bunch of Asian characters that I can’t read plus a few English phrases indicating attempts to market cracked software from Microsoft. Yeah, it’s a hassle to run this site, but it’s what God has called me to do.

So I’m going about this process of studying how to provide my own services and even buying some of the necessary equipment with your generous donations. This is DIY web services for a reason. At first I had to wonder why I felt so provoked to go this way. My instinct was to ponder if it was necessary to spend a lot of effort in high security preparations, but that doesn’t seem to be so important. I believe in prayer and how it changes us and helps us shed false impressions infesting our minds and imaginations. The longer I pray and contemplate what’s going on, the more it seems the real issue is not to worry about attacks, but to insure availability.

I’m utterly certain God’s wrath on America is merely the localized manifestation of His general wrath on the West. To the degree America dominates whatever it means to be “Western” we shall see America get a bigger share of that wrath, but it is sure to spill over into other places. That spillover includes virtual places. I really believe that many of the current services that we treat like public accommodation will go away or simply become less accessible. The funding model behind most of it is dissolving before our eyes. These are effects, not so much God’s purpose and plan. To the degree any of that stuff rests on making a profit, it will tend to disappear because profit will be hard to obtain. Only what people do for other reasons will stay around. This is why I trust Open Source software: It tends to arise from a non-profit drive to excel for its own sake. I’m seriously working to move away from reliance on commercially produced software.

Obviously I’m not trying to make a profit myself. I do this because something inside drives me and I can’t be silent or still. So it comes to my conscious mind that if I plan to keep doing this, I have to be ready to do more of it myself. In order to serve God, I have to know more about Internet services and the gritty details of running those services. I’m all too willing to share what I know and encourage you to be ready to learn as much as you need to provide your own ministry. I would talk about things like having sufficient hardware with the capabilities for running some of the services you require to minister, and stop relying on the Cloud to cover it. Even in Windows you can learn to run a server, or simply gather the software tools and learn how to use them so that you can pass the content to some other device somewhere.

If you sense even the slightest drawing to do something, I would urge you to research the new line of more powerful home routers. You’d be amazed at the stuff they’ll do, and you’d be surprised at how much your ISP will let you get away with. For example, most of them tolerate a private FTP server like mine because it’s not enough traffic to worry about. It’s so common these days they have a hard time telling you “no.” Properly secured against hijacking and abuse, a powerful home router can make your Internet presence much easier to maintain. If you need to do this stuff, learn how it works and do it well.

My point is this: We are coming into a time of tribulation when one of the few hopes for keeping your sanity is a driving sense of purpose. If you can keep your eyes on those things God demands of you personally, you can weather a lot of really tough conditions. I’m not doing this stuff because it’s a fun hobby; that might have been the case some years ago, but now I have a hard and clear focus on the imperative of divine glory. I’m not an activist fighting much of a human threat, either in the flesh or virtually. My focus is less about defending from attacks and more about making sure I provide with my own hands what is suitable for my calling. We all lean on each other, but right now there’s no one else in a position to do that work for me. I’m okay with that; this is something I tend to do well enough on my own, as it were. As things get tighter economically, I’ll have to gear up and do even more. A great many tasks in our Kingdom service will turn out to be more DIY than now seems necessary.

Part of that understanding is an awareness of the level of deception from the world about what’s going on. Some things are far worse than we are told, while there’s plenty of false alarm to distract. We’ve been talking about that already, so I don’t need to say much right now. It’s already past time, but you can start now reassessing what your calling demands and what you may need to provide in-house as we face a challenging future.

So right now I’m working on gathering content that supports my teaching. This is a mission of building the library and keeping it available. Maybe it’s a little superfluous right now, but I feel certain some of it will disappear suddenly. At the same time I’m updating and reformatting my own content to ensure it’s in the most digestible package I can offer. I’m trusting God for a lot of things I can’t do, but whatever I can do is now my sacred mission.

Right now the focus is content and availability.